CATCHING BREATH

Drowning in the Sea of Liquid Futility

Terry L. Rankin
15 May 2021
Saint Cloud, FL

Liquid Times
Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty is a 2006 book by Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt
Bauman (1925-2017). I discovered Bauman’s work during my studies and research for my Doctor of
Ministry (DMin), 2015-2019. My dissertation, “The End Signs! Are We Getting the Message?” (decidedly
not a treatise on eschatology), incorporated Bauman’s conception of Liquid Modernity as exactly the
perspective needed to sharpen the focus of the historical parallax aspects of my views.1
This except from the Introduction to Bauman’s 2006 book (“Bravely into the Hotbed of Uncertainties”)
conveys the essential idea of liquid modernity, while briefly explaining how it applies to the sociocultural
milieu of our times in particular, and to the 21st century more generally, as times of singular uncertainty:
First of all, the passage from the ‘solid’ to a ‘liquid’ phase of modernity: that is, into a
condition in which social forms (structures that limit individual choices, institutions that guard
repetitions of routines, patterns of acceptable behaviour) can no longer (and are not
expected) to keep their shape for long, because they decompose and melt faster than the
time it takes to cast them, and once they are cast for them to set. Forms, whether already
present or only adumbrated, are unlikely to be given enough time to solidify, and cannot
serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life strategies because of
their short life expectation: indeed, a life expectation shorter than the time it takes to
develop a cohesive and consistent strategy, and still shorter than the fulfilment of an
individual ‘life project’ requires.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times
Wiley (2006). Kindle Edition (p. 1)
What I understand Bauman to be saying here is that the half-life of whatever we take to be truths about
reality in these times of our collapse predicament, their half-life is so short that any true relevance it could
establish and any real difference it could make are never realized, never instantiated. They’re dissipated
to vanish in liquefaction or sublimation before they can manifest with any palpable efficacy—it’s as if the
half-lives of truth and reality fall somewhere between a zeptojiffy and a nanojiffy.2
In other words, in the temporal currents, flows, and tides of liquid times, if changes are differences at all,
they’re differences that make no difference whatsoever—past, present, or future—at least for the being

1 Rankin, Terry L., "The End Signs! Are We Getting the Message?" (2019). Seminary Doctoral Program, Semiotics and Future
Studies. 307. https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/dmin/307.
2 A zeptojiffy in theoretical physics is 3 × 10−46 seconds, the amount of time light takes to travel one fermi (about the size of a
nucleon) in a vacuum. A nanojiffy is 3 × 10−34 seconds, the amount of time light takes to travel one fermi (about the size of a
nucleon) in a vacuum. Despite the difference of 10−12 seconds in theoretical measure, for all practical intents and purposes (if
there are any), they’re ‘roughly’ equivalent, i.e., both express the time light takes to travel a distance of one fermi (about the
size of a nucleon) in a vacuum. See Time Wiki, “Lists of Units of Time,” website, https://time.fandom.com/wiki/Jiffy_(time).
and presence of virtually all terrestrial life. The liquidity of our 21st century times has locked us inevitably
and inescapably into irrelevance and irreality: our past, present, and future have arrived at their darkest
and bitterest end, wholly suffused in endlessly tempestuous seas of sheer futility wherein we drift, drown,
and sink, gasping for any breath of fresh hope, clear conscience, and good faith in and for ourselves.

Liquid Love
What’s the opposite of love? Hatred? Apathy? Nihilism? Sociopathy?
I suggest futility is the best answer. Whatever we take love to be—even in its most unrequited state—it is
never entirely futile, it is always a real and true difference in our being and presence in life, it always
and all ways makes all the differences in who we are and how we live. Love—even in its absence—is
inextricably woven into the core of our being and vibrant in the light of our presence, however brightly it
may shine, however dimly it may glow.
From this vantage, we are lost, awash and adrift, doomed; drowning en masse in stormy seas of futility
suffusing our liquid times precisely because of our failure to abide in unconditionally liquid (agapé) love
of and for all creation, for every creature, especially for ourselves throughout our being and presence in
life on Earth. Our mere 200 millennia of cosmic traversal is a gnat’s breath duration in the 14 billion-
year-old causal baseline of natural truth and reality in the universe.
Our capacity for love—for loving and being loved unconditionally—is the one and only true and real
difference we could’ve and should’ve made all through that infinite eternity of timespace. But alas, at
last, we didn’t—we wouldn’t, due to the sheer futility of the vile will of our #wetiko vanity.
Futility is obliterated in the nomic causal baseline of Nature. To manifest the futility of our being and the
pointlessness of our presence in Nature is to seal our fate, destiny, and natural end to annihilation. This is
the absolute rule, order, necessity, and potential of our human nature—either we prove our loving and
unconditional fealty to the absolute permaculture sovereignty of Nature’s lawful causal efficacy, or she
disappears us from being in her presence at all.
Here too Bauman reveals the liquefying of love and death in life, citing Czech novelist Ivan Klima:
(T)here is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love. Each appearance of
either of the two is a one-off, but also once-and-for-all appearance, brooking no
repetition, allowing no appeal and promising no reprieve. Each one must, and does, stand
‘on its own’. Each one is born for the first time, or born again, whenever it enters, always
sprouting from nowhere, from the darkness of non-being without past or future. Each one,
each time, begins from the beginning, laying bare the superfluity of past plots and the
vanity of all future plotting. Neither love nor death can be entered twice; even less so
than Heraclitus’ river. They are, indeed, their own head and tails, being dismissive and
negligent of all others.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
Wiley (2013), Kindle Edition (loc 148)
From each zeptojiffy to the next nanojiffy in the liquid times we’re living and dying in, therefore, our
gasps of unfettered, unrestrained, uncompromising, unconditional love dissolve futility in those instants.
Love fulfills and transcends the mere causality of our being and presence in life. In its purity, we are the
sublimation of liquid futility into the only meaning of our truth and the only purpose of our reality for
being present in nature at all.
As we live and breathe, may it always and all ways be in the name and for the sake of love. Futile, love
never is; ever fertile in spirit, faith, truth, and reality, all the essence essential to live and thrive is love.
_______ If we didn’t love language – good, bad, ugly, all 7000+ of them – we’d be hushed more often
than we blather on in social immediation games, where visual signs blur in life-speed spy-by noise, signal
quality and clarity dissipating as meme ciphers, fast-pasting truth and reality instantly equivocated in a
semiosic barrage of doubleplusgood duckspeak permanent lies, we blithely acquiesce to the plain drone
noise as omnipotence incarnate; holy, divine, and being panentheistic presence, manifesting absolute and
perfectly engineered cognate and cognitive communications, command, control, wielding all the levers of
harmonious resonance in symphonic synchrony at cosmic scale. If we were wise we wouldn’t speak at all
above a whisper, but for the groans of our weeping and the drumbeat of our sobs.
I know a pilgrim, a prophet, and a visionary.
The pilgrim is young man on an 800-mile spiritual journey, guided by the sparsely elegant and eloquent
teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharsh, begun on Earth Day 2021 in Miami, continuing on foot to
Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Fort Myers, Tampa, Orlando, Gainesville, Jacksonville, and blocking
Interstate 10 from there to state capital Tallahassee on Labor Day 6 September.3
The prophet is mad – like this author, contending with a rage of grief set aflame by prophetic destiny
and drive, a lapsed Christian existentialist if religious at all, a classic Hobbesian conservative driven by
the social contract ideal and the principles of justice, integrity, and civility as its moral bearing. Ethical
winds of authentic existential good faith and storms of resolute will and liberatory force thrust him into
pristinely clear but ultimately ineffable presence of reality and truth whose very being present shatters
syntax, implodes semantics into smithereens of itself, and pulverizes heuristic or pragmatic posture and
parade to a fine powder of irrelevance, breathes out a sharp puff, and casts their fates to the winds. 4

3 This is a true story. The Walk With Nick pilgrimage and climate action protest march, has endorsements from three Turtle
Island indigenous groups. Will DeSantis deign to meet with Nick as demanded? https://xramerica.org/walk-with-nick/
4 Roger Hallam, cofounder of XR and itinerant rabble rouser and